Credit: Gartner. Top10 Strategic Technology trends for 2019.
A smart space is a physical or digital environment in which humans and technology-enabled
systems interact in increasingly open, connected, coordinated and intelligent ecosystems. Multiple
elements — including people, processes, services and things — come together in a smart space to
create a more immersive, interactive and automated experience for a target set of personas or
industry scenarios.
This trend has been coalescing for some time around elements such as smart cities, digital
workplaces, smart homes and connected factories. We believe the market is entering a period of
accelerated delivery of robust smart spaces, with technology becoming an integral part of our daily
lives, whether as employees, customers, consumers, community members or citizens. AI-related
trends, the expansion of IoT-connected edge devices, the development of digital twins of things and
organizations, and the maturing of blockchain offer increasing opportunities to drive more
connected, coordinated and intelligent solutions across target environments (see Figure 9).
Individual organizations have long used technology for targeted purposes, but with the supporting
systems typically closed and isolated from one another. As systems move to more dynamic
coordination, organizations are applying AI and other technologies to create a much more flexible
and autonomous level of coordination among systems. This is particularly so as the IoT
phenomenon drives computing from isolated desktops and mobile devices into the world around
us. Changes in the user experience are also changing how people interact with one another and
with systems in a smart space. Smart spaces are evolving along five key dimensions:
■ Openness. Openness refers to the degree of accessibility to the elements in a smart space. For
example, in a closed model, individual applications or systems in a smart space would be
isolated from one another with no sharing of data. Alternatively, if data were shared, it would be
shared in a controlled and proprietary way. In contrast, in an open model, systems would be
aware of one another, with data exposed and accessible to a wide audience through
standardized mechanisms. Trends in open data formats, identi€ers and protocols, as well as the
work of open-source communities, are driving this aspect of smart spaces.
■ Connectedness. Connectedness refers to the depth, breadth and robustness of the links
between the elements in a smart space. Connectedness is closely related to openness. If
there’s no connection, there’s no access to any of the functions or data of an application in the
smart space, other than the prede€ned user interface. Such a system would be closed. As the
mechanisms to access the attributes, data and functions of an application increase, the degree
of openness increases. Increasing the granularity of the accessible attributes, data and
functions also increases connectedness. Trends such as the IoT, IoT platforms, digital twins edge computing, APIs and API gateways, and mesh app and service architecture (MASA) all
contribute to greater connectedness in a smart space.
■ Coordination. Coordination refers to the depth and robustness of coordination between the
elements in a smart space. Coordination is a more active aspect of smart spaces that builds on
connectedness. While connectedness looks at the opportunity to connect various elements,
coordination looks at the actual level of interaction and cooperation between the elements. For
example, two applications operating in a smart space that shared login credentials would have
a very low coordination score. However, if they also shared data and had tightly integrated
process execution, they would have a much higher coordination score. Trends such as MASA,
APIs and events also factor into coordination. So does blockchain, which offers a mechanism to
dramatically reduce business friction between elements in a smart space through a shared
ledger and smart contracts.
■ Intelligence. Intelligence refers to the use of machine learning and other AI techniques to drive
automation into the smart space and deliver services to augment the activities of people in it.
Intelligence can manifest itself in the form of autonomous things or augmented intelligence,
including augmented analytics. An important aspect is the use of AI to:
■ Help users in the smart space
■ Deliver immersive experiences to enhance how users perceive and interact with other
elements in the smart space
■ Scope. Scope refers to the breadth of a smart space and its participants. A smart space with a
very narrow scope would focus on a single team within a department of a large organization. A
smart space with a broader scope might focus more across the organization but within a
bounded problem space. A smart space with an even broader scope might include elements
external to the organization with an ecosystem of participants. Openness, connectedness and
coordination set the stage for increasing the scope of a smart space. Intelligence promotes
simplified access and automated management as the scope of a smart space increases.
In the long term, smart spaces will evolve to deliver intelligent environments in which multiple
entities coordinate their activities in digital ecosystems and drive use cases or contextualized
speci€c service experiences. In the ultimate manifestation of a smart space in the intelligent
environment phase, there will be rich digital-twin models of people, processes and things across a
city. Event-driven structures will replace predefined hard-coded integration points. Virtual assistants
and independent agents will monitor and coordinate activities across multiple systems inside the
organization or government entities and across multiple entities. Open data exchanges and the use
of blockchain will reduce friction between different players in the ecosystem and the systems they
use. It will be possible to add new capabilities to existing environments without upgrading the entire
infrastructure.
Meanwhile, individuals operating in smart space ecosystems will use ever-expanding IoT edge
devices and more immersive experiences. Technology will seem to fade into the background around
them. Instead of using computers, the entire world around them will be their computer. This longterm smart space intelligent environment model won’t exist until 2028 at the earliest. However,
organizations can achieve it much sooner in more narrowly defined industry scenarios with a targeted set of personas and processes. Individual elements will evolve rapidly through 2023,
spawning this new phase of smart spaces.
